I’m just back from Unconvention Salford, which took place over the weekend. Once again it was an inspirational, thought-provoking and ‘exhausting’ experience

Things have been pretty hectic for me recently. I haven’t had the time i would have liked to be spending on band matters, plus we’re generally in an altered state of activity at the moment, with the monthly recording sessions ongoing over in Scotland. These factors left me wanting for an actual objective to be in Salford, but that problem was soon dispelled by the ‘Outside the Box’ panel moderated by Andrew Dubber on Friday morning. This saw several artists (including the insightful and very funny Steve Lawson) from outside the ‘mainstream/indie’ sectors describe how they make a living from their love of music and associated talents.

I’m not sure if it was actually important that these people were musically ‘different’, but moreso that the individuals themselves just relished finding fresh, interesting and different ways of developing their careers. As a band, this attitude is something that we’ve shared from day one. We may be a band, and we’ll try to make the best music we can, but we won’t let that stop us being creative and having fun in everything we do. We’ve also been pretty realistic of our definition of success, reviewing and updating our plans and goals every few months, always taking a few upwards steps, and always doing what we feel is best, not too worried about what anyone else is doing or thinking.

So the main panel ‘take-aways’ about taking risks, but being realistic, having an identity, but knowing how to find your place in the big picture, having fun, and not delusions of grandeur, generally chimed with me and the band, and left me ready to get stuck in again. We’ve been working hard on the new recordings for the last six months, Chris in particular, and there is still a good way to go, but we’re enjoying every minute and are getting excited thinking about how we’ll get it all our there!

We realise that we want to connect more with the people that like our music. So far we’ve made many new friends, and they’ve helped us reach further than we could have imagined. We’re always looking for help, and interesting ideas, so please get in touch, and don’t forget the twitter feed: @escapeact.

Rich

PS. I also took part in a panel called ‘Artist as Enterprise’ – we didn’t really talk about that to be honest, but i sat next to Martin Atkins, (former drummer of Killing Joke, and much more) – a very wise man, believer of the ‘one fan at a time’ philosophy and author of Tour:Smart – a book i shall be absorbing over the coming weeks. You can grab an ebook copy from his site: http://tstouring.com/.

PPS. Although it’ll be a while before we’re ready to release new material, we did a session for bandwidthfilms.com yesterday. We performed new song ‘Salt In Your Eye’ and it’ll be online in a few days, but in the meantime, here are some shaky phone pics…

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